Through airy heights of poesy;
Pausing, smiles with altered air
To see thee climb his elbow-chair,
Or, struggling with the mat below,
Hold warfare with his slippered toe.
Joanna Baillie.
CATS.
God made the cat in order to give to man the pleasurable sense of having caressed the tiger.
Méry.
Public sentiment is not so unanimously in favour of cats, yet they have had their warm admirers, while in Egypt they were adored as divine—worshipped as an emblem of the moon. When a cat died, the owners gave the body a showy funeral, went into mourning, and shaved off their eyebrows. Diodorus tells of a Roman soldier who was condemned to death for killing a cat. It is said that Cambyses, King of Persia, when he went to fight the Egyptians, fastened before every soldier’s breast a live cat. Their enemies dared not run the risk of hurting their sacred pets, and so were conquered.